Protecting Mosques in New YorkBy: Robert Spencer FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, September 04, 2008

The New York Police Department on Tuesday announced plans to
beef up security around New York City mosques for Ramadan.

This is an understandable step.After all, it has long been known that the Saudis control 80% of the mosques in the United States. As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi
leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declaredin a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled
most mosques in America: “The most dangerous thing that is going on now in
these mosques,” he said, “that has been sent upon these mosques around the
United States – like churches they were established by different organizations and
that is ok – but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology.
Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that
they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the
US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the
methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim
population, but not all of them agree with it.”

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed
the same thing in 2005. She said that 80% of the mosques in this country
“have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence.” The Saudis would build
large mosques for immigrant Muslim communities in the United States, and send a
Saudi imam to staff the new facility. The Saudis, said Barsky, have spent as
much as $80 billion on such efforts over the last thirty years.

Note also that hate propaganda of just this kind has been
found in American mosques -- which should not be surprising not only because of
the Saudi connection but because much of this is mainstream Islamic teaching.
The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 that hate propaganda against
Jews and Christians fills Saudi textbooks used in Islamic schools in America,
and in June 2008 federal
investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite
promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated
that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims
to kill and seize the property of “polytheists.”

Incidentally, the 1999 valedictorian of the Islamic Saudi
Academy was Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who is now serving thirty years
in prison for joining an Al-Qaeda plot to kill Bush.

And finally, note that jihadist activity tends to increase
during Ramadan. According
to Professor Nizar Hamzeh, a specialist on political Islam at the American
University of Beirut, “Ramadan is a month of commitment and renewal to their
faith and also to their cause, whether by military or nonmilitary jihad. It is
a month of martyrdom and commitment to one’s Islamic ideology.”

In light of all that, it’s easy to see why it would be
altogether fitting and proper for the NYPD to heighten security around city
mosques during Ramadan. However, that is not what is happening. The New York Daily News ran a story with
the headline “NYPD
beefs up security for Ramadan,” and readers might have been forgiven for
thinking that New York cops would be on alert against terror attacks possibly
coming during the month in which Muslims redouble their efforts to serve Allah
-- right? Wrong. In reality, the NYPD is beefing up its protection of the
mosques themselves. Apparently they are under threat from venomous
Islamophobes, and that threat heightens during Ramadan. “Local precincts,” said
the report, “will dispatch more officers on foot patrol and in squad cars to
patrol the areas surrounding the mosques during the month-long religious
observance that begins on Monday.” New York police officers “will also be
briefed on the religious guidelines specific to Ramadan in anticipation of the
observances,” and “community leaders” were “warned to be mindful of the mosque’s
donation boxes, some of which were robbed last year.”

Any vigilante attack against any mosque in the U.S. is wrong
and stupid, and to be condemned. But this is just another indication of how
CAIR’s hate crimes propaganda, trumped-up
as it is, rules the day: the mosques are well protected, but how well
protected are the potential victims of the jihadists who may be inside those
mosques? Unfortunately, it is increasingly too politically incorrect to worry
much about them. Polls
show that fewer Americans believe that terrorism is a serious threat now
than at any time since before 9/11. “Islamophobia” is the problem, not Islamic
terrorism. But as we march bravely into this grand new future, we may suffer a
rude awakening or two, courtesy of people who were duly grateful that their
mosques were so ably guarded during Ramadan.

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